Dr. Shield's Arc

Chapter 1 of 13

Dr. Shield wiped blood from her hands onto a rag that was already stiff with it. The man on her table had stopped breathing twice in the last hour, and she'd brought him back both times with nothing but her fists and the rhythm her mentor had drilled into her palms. Sherrie stood in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for answers the man couldn't give yet. Shield pressed two fingers against his neck and counted. The pulse was there, thin as wire. She'd packed the gunshot wound with strips torn from a bedsheet she'd boiled that morning in a barrel behind the old hospital. Her surgical kit sat open on the metal workstation beside her—scalpels she'd sharpened on concrete, forceps she'd traded a week's worth of stitches for, a hand-crank drill with a bit thin enough to relieve pressure without turning a skull into splinters. The tools gleamed under the battery-powered lamp clamped to the table edge. "How long?" Sherrie asked. Shield didn't look up. She lifted the man's eyelid and watched his pupil contract in the light. Slow, but it moved. "He'll wake up in an hour. Maybe two." She adjusted the IV line running into his arm—a salvaged bag of saline she'd filtered three times and hung from a rusted coat rack. "If he doesn't start seizing first." Her hands moved across his chest, checking the drainage tube she'd fashioned from a length of aquarium hose. Clear fluid, no blood. That was something. Sherrie stepped closer, eyes fixed on the man's face. "He talks, or this was a waste." She pulled a flask from her jacket and took a sip. "Your call if he's worth keeping comfortable." Shield's jaw tightened. She reached for a vial of morphine—one of four she had left—and drew half into a syringe. Not enough to cloud his mind when he woke, but enough to keep him from thrashing and tearing what she'd just repaired. She pushed the needle into his IV port and watched his face soften. "He'll talk," she said. "And he'll live long enough to do it." She turned to face Sherrie, her hands still red despite the rag. "That's what you paid for."